Hannibal (24 page)

XXII

UNENDING WAR

The tempo of the war could only slacken. The losses sustained by both sides were sufficient to make them weaken as much from loss of blood as from faltering determination. The army that Hannibal had brought into Italy over the mountains must long since have changed its temper and construction; nine years cannot have failed to have taken a great toll of those veterans of Spain, France and the Alps, who had once gazed down with expectancy upon the rich prize of Italy.

There are no records, and one can only presume that, after so many engagements, the original strength of armoured Carthaginians had been heavily depleted—even though victorious in all their major battles. It is clear that the Numidian horse had been reinforced by transports from Africa. This light brigade of cavalry remains in evidence to the end of the long war but, curiously enough, there is no further reference to the heavy brigade of horsemen—although it is possible that Polybius and Livy merely assumed that they were always present. The main body of the infantry had certainly changed beyond all measure, Spaniards being replaced by Gauls, and they in their turn by Bruttians. There must also have been many defectors from the Roman camp—deserters (not the best of soldiers), Etruscans who had long hated the city that had overthrown their own state and, since the fall of Capua, Campanians who no longer dared to return to their own land. It was a heterogeneous force to lead against that formidable compound of states that Rome had annealed. Hannibal, with the fall of Capua, had also lost allies and there was little or no likelihood of their being replaced. Rome had shown how ruthless was her judgement against defectors, and only another victory of the immensity of Cannae could convince the states of Italy that Hannibal was the potential ruler of the whole peninsula.

Rome was also feeling the effort of sustaining so long a war. War-weariness was clearly evident on the Roman side and the burden of heavy taxation, to which there seemed no end, contributed to a general atmosphere of defeatism. As Livy puts it:

Complaints began to be heard among Latins and their allies in their gatherings: that now for the tenth year they had been exhausted by levies of troops and their pay; that almost every year they fought in a disastrous defeat. Some, they said, were slain in battle, others carried off by disease. The townsman who was enlisted by the Romans was lost to them more completely than a man taken captive by the Carthaginians. For with no demand for a ransom the enemy sent him back to his native town; the Romans transported him out of Italy…. If the old soldiers should not return to their native places, and fresh soldiers continued to be levied, soon no one would be left. Accordingly, what the situation itself would soon refuse must be refused the Roman people, without waiting to reach the extremes of desolation and poverty. If the Romans should see the allies unanimous to this effect, surely they would think of making peace with the Carthaginians. Otherwise never, so long as Hannibal lived, would Italy be rid of war.

Twelve Roman colonies out of the thirty that comprised the Roman state revolted in 209, informing the consuls that they had no means left to furnish further soldiers or money. In order to pay the armies, even the sacred treasure of Rome, to which recourse might be had only in the very gravest of emergencies, had to be distrained upon for its gold. The senators were urged—and responded—to bring in the private gold, silver and jewels of their families in order to replenish the coffers of the State. Never in its history had Rome been reduced to such penury, and it looked as if the threat posed by Hannibal and his army was in no way likely to recede.

Although towns which had turned to the Carthaginians were restored to the Roman allegiance—Salapia in Apulia, for one, and Meles and Narronea in Samnium—the fearsome shadow of the invader still overhung great areas of Italy. When the Romans were rash enough to engage him, as happened at Herdonia, they learned the usual bloody lesson. Here the proconsul Fulvius Centumalus had been encamped against the town, while treating with a pro-Roman party within the walls. When Hannibal heard of the threat, he moved up from Bruttium by forced marches and engaged the two legions under Centumalus; his cavalry struck at the rear of the legions while his heavy infantry held them in the front. The result was another of those mortifying Roman defeats which, until the end of the war in Italy, made every Roman general tremble for his reputation when confronted by the Carthaginian. Marcellus, who had returned from his victory over Syracuse in Sicily, was one of the consuls for the year 210 and was the one Roman general for whom Hannibal evinced any real respect, saying of him: ‘Marcellus is the only general who, when victorious, gives his enemy no rest, and, when defeated, takes none himself.’ Hannibal’s dry turn of phrase is revealed in a comparison he is said to have made between Fabius ‘the delayer’ and Marcellus: ‘Fabius was a schoolmaster whom I respected, but Marcellus was a worthy foe: the one would not let me do any mischief, but the other caused me to suffer it.’ Marcellus was to share part of the campaign of 209, in which Hannibal was to lose his last important holding in Italy, the city-port of Tarentum. The other consul for the year was old Fabius Maximus, who for the first time was to gain an ascendancy over the man who had successfully challenged him on previous occasions. While Fabius brought his forces down from the north and proceeded to march on Tarentum, Marcellus harassed Hannibal and dogged his footsteps on his march in true ‘Fabian’ style. Apart from these two armies, Rome fielded that year a further one under Fulvius Flaccus, to reduce towns in Lucania and Samnium which had shown favour to the Carthaginians.

Hannibal’s opening campaign, which had so very nearly succeeded, had been designed to break Rome’s spirit by a series of massive victories in the field. He had achieved the victories, but still Rome had pugnaciously refused
to yield. His second, and political, campaign had been designed to break the spirit of Rome’s allies and, in doing so, to shatter the Latin confederacy upon which Rome must necessarily lean for money and manpower. Yet, after nine years and more of war, eighteen out of the thirty allies remained faithful to Rome and the twelve who had just renegued had done so only because their manpower was exhausted and their treasuries empty. Two major factors had always plagued Hannibal since he had realised that he must fight a war of attrition on enemy soil. The first was the lack of a siege train and the second the lack of trained heavily-armed infantry, which could only come from Carthage itself or Spain. The Roman command of the sea, established in the First Punic War, had clearly demonstrated that a state like the Carthaginian, dependent so largely upon overseas trade, must command the sea or perish. (This was a lesson that British statesmen and commanders, educated in the classics, had well absorbed by the time of their eighteenth century wars with France.)

It was astounding that Hannibal with his small body of Carthaginian officers and his dwindling corps of professional soldiers had been able to use the manpower of rough Gauls and primitive Bruttians to such effect. At the same time, while his own army, however well Hanno and others had recruited replacements, declined in strength, the Romans drew upon the powerful numbers of the large and relatively prosperous land of Italy. Only a major reinforcement of ardent and trained soldiers could give Hannibal back the initiative he had had when he entered Italy, and which he had subsequently confirmed at Cannae. This reinforcement must either come over the Alps from Spain or by sea from Carthage into southern Italy. The Romans of the Republic had learned much from their early mistakes in the field against a genius of war and had now permanently adopted the tactics of attrition against him. They had also learned a great deal of the necessary overall strategy for dealing with a war encompassing a large area—in this case the whole Mediterranean basin. While they were engaging the enemy in Spain they calculated that the first thing to do in the Italian peninsula was to prevent Hannibal from receiving any reinforcements from Greece or Carthage. The key to this was Tarentum, where the Roman garrison in the citadel had denied full usage of the port to the Carthaginian.

While Marcellus followed Hannibal’s army and tried to lure him northward towards Apulia, distracting him sufficiently to make him turn aside on at least two occasions, Fabius Maximus moved swiftly towards the ancient Greek seaport. In the long run it was little matter that Hannibal turned back and fought off Marcellus, compelling his army to withdraw to their quarters at Venusia. Marcellus had achieved his object and, while Hannibal was engaging him, the army of his fellow consul Fabius had arrived before the walls of Tarentum. Like the citizens of Capua, the Tarentines had not overexerted themselves in the Carthaginian cause (both had merely hoped for an easier and less-taxed life) and had signally failed against the Roman-held citadel. It is clear that Hannibal that year was expecting reinforcements from North Africa, for he was now distracted from the problem of Tarentum by a siege of the port of Caulon in the south-east corner of Bruttium, carried out by troops now freed from concerns in Sicily. After mauling Marcellus so badly that he had been compelled to retire, Hannibal marched right through the heart of Bruttium and lifted the siege of Caulon.

He would have done better to have looked first at Tarentum, but one can only assume that he had designated Caulon as the disembarkation point for the Carthaginian troops, since it was an insignificant and obscure port in the deep south, well within friendly territory. There were spies everywhere in those days, and just as the Carthaginians had their own agents within the very walls of Rome so in every port where merchants came and went there must have been sharp eyes that provided information to one side or another in this struggle for the Mediterranean world. With their hold over the Messina Strait and their occupation of Syracuse the Romans were in a good position to know when and where a Carthaginian fleet was to be expected. Hannibal received no reinforcements that year by sea or by land. He was now to lose his last and only major port, Tarentum.

Leaving Caulon restored to Carthaginian hands and sympathisers, he marched right back along the ‘foot’ of southern Italy and round the great Gulf of Tarentum—to reach the city just after it had fallen. Despite his diversion against Marcellus to the north, and his further diversion to relieve Caulon in the south-east, he was only five miles from the city when Tarentum was betrayed from within. The troops of Fabius Maximus, who had never been able to face Hannibal with any confidence upon the field, gazed out from the walls and mocked their enemy. Carthalo, the Carthaginian commander, had been killed in the fighting after the Romans had broken in, as had the two Tarentines principally responsible for the city’s original betrayal. As he came within sight of the walls Hannibal is said to have been told by a scout what had happened and is credited with the cool comment: ‘So the Romans also have a Hannibal. They have taken Tarentum as we did.’

Tarentum was to stand as a further monument to the Roman determination that all should know that receiving the Carthaginians was sadly unprofitable. As Livy recounts:

Soldiers slew men everywhere, whether armed or unarmed, Carthaginians and Tarentines alike. Everywhere Bruttians also were slain, many of them, either by mistake or old, inbred hatred of them, or to blot out the thought of treachery, that Tarentum might be thought to have been captured rather by force of arms. Then from the slaughter they dispersed to plunder the city. Thirty thousand slaves are said to have been captured, an immense quantity of silver, wrought and coined, of gold three thousand and eighty pounds, statues and paintings, so that they almost rivalled the adornments of Syracuse.

It is noticeable that Livy, writing of the history and greatness of his city and her rise to power, does not omit such details of that iron ruthlessness which finally ensured the Roman empire. When Hannibal captured the city, he had been careful to ensure that there was minimum bloodshed and that only the houses of pro-Roman Tarentines should be looted.

He now proceeded to withdraw in the direction of Metapontum, across the bay from Tarentum, where he arranged for a number of distinguished citizens to go to Fabius and offer to betray their city if the Romans would move against it. Hannibal had his army concealed on either side of the route to Metapontum and there can be little doubt that if Fabius had moved, he would have fallen into a typical Hannibalic trap—from which neither he nor his army would have escaped. On this occasion, however, the Romans were saved by their religious observances, for Fabius, a man of the old school, would never march without taking the omens, and the priest on each occasion, after inspecting the sacrifice, found them unfavourable and warned Fabius that he must be on guard ‘against the ruse of an enemy’. Knowing the reluctance of Fabius to make any move that could expose his men to unknown dangers it is more than probable that he himself had a hand in interpreting the sacrifices. His suspicions were confirmed when the citizens from Metapontum returned on a second occasion to inquire why the Romans delayed from moving against their
city and, being arrested and threatened with torture, confessed the plot.

The loss of Capua and now the loss of Tarentum were accurately read by Hannibal as the disasters that they were. He is said to have remarked to his officers, ‘Unless we can acquire new strength we have lost the war in Italy.’ He had hoped that Tarentum would serve as a disembarkation port for reinforcements from Carthage as well as for use by his Macedonian ally. With its loss he had even less hope of enticing Philip to move troops across the Adriatic to support the invasion of Italy. He remained undefeated in the field, but this in itself meant little. He could only look towards Spain and his brother Hasdrubal—and the news from Spain was bad.